Bumblebees are the pollinator of choice for many commercial hydroponic growers. They are great at picking up pollen on their big hairy bodies and moving it around. If you’re growing flowering plants indoors and don’t want to introduce bees into your home, you can hand pollinate. 🐝
With some plants, like peppers and tomatoes, each flower has both male and female parts. You just need to transfer pollen from the female part to the male part of the flower. This can be accomplished by dusting each flower with a paintbrush, shaking the plant daily, or aiming a fan at the plant to get things moving. 🍅
Other plants like zucchini and most (but not all) cucumbers have separate male and female flowers. To pollinate these, you can use a paintbrush to collect pollen from a male flower and then deposit it into the middle of the female flower. You can also just pick the male flower, remove the petals and directly deposit the pollen into the middle of a female flower. To identify a female flower, just look at the flower’s base. If there’s a mini version of the vegetable growing there, it’s a girl! If not, you have a boy!
Do you have pollination tips to share? We would love to hear them in the comments below. Happy Growing!
